Zakir Hussain - Sunjog
Everyone knows all about the bloated top end of star ratings. If you're presented with a 5 point scale, you'll rarely see anything other than 3, 4 and 5 point scores. I never understood this dislike that people have for putting the boot in when it comes to criticism. There's so much material out there that richly deserves a good mauling.

All of which leads me utterly perplexed by the following review of Making Music by Zakir Hussain on allmusic.com.

World fusion/jazz group falls short of its great potential. With guitar star John Mclaughlin. (2.5/5)

That's the entire review. It's written by someone called Michael G. Nastos. I'm left wondering what more Mr Nastos could possible want. Making Music is widely acclaimed as being one of, if not the finest east/west fusion albums ever made. What more could it do to reach this great potential of which Mr. Natsos writes? Maybe he was expecting it to leap from the turntable, caress his balls, and enthusiastically suck him off. Alas, as we were all to discover, it is only music.

Hussain is one of the most successful tabla players of his generation. Here he's joined by Jan Garbarek, the aforementioned McLaughlin, and Indian classical flautist Hariprasad Chaurasia. They're all equal partners in the music. Sunjog opens with a gloriously woozy sax line, and just gets better from there as the various instruments wake up, solo, and finally start talking to each other. It doesn't get better than this.

Zakir Hussain - Sunjog